Degas would also have seen Suzanne most Wednesdays, when the painter Alfred Stevens hosted a soirée, and on Mondays when Degas’s own father organized little concerts in the rue de Mondovi. Music played a vital role at all these gatherings. The French had discovered Wagner by now—sending many, including Baudelaire, into raptures. Schumann was the latest Teutonic discovery: Many in Manet’s circle heard his music first through the fingers of Suzanne.
Manet himself is said not to have had much of an ear for music. If he enjoyed it (we are told he loved Haydn), his interest was casual. Degas, on the other hand, was genuinely absorbed. Since the age of twenty, he had held a season ticket to the opera. He had contrarian tastes. He mocked the Wagner cult, preferring Verdi. He also liked Gluck, Cimarosa, and Gounod—which, taken together, marked him out as something of a conservative. He was friendly with several composers, including Bizet, and with many musicians besides Suzanne, among them the amateur pianist Madame Camus; the bassoonist Désiré Dihau; Dihau’s sister Marie, a pianist who gave singing lessons; and the tenor and guitarist Lorenzo Pagans. All these musicians were portrayed by Degas in the act of playing, and usually with other people listening, just as in the portrait of Manet and Suzanne.
In fact, concentrated in the years between 1867 and 1873, these paintings of musical performance in intimate settings constituted a vital intermediate stage in Degas’s move toward the series of paintings that made him truly famous, truly “Degas”—the crowded orchestra pits, the café concert performances, and, above all, the ballet rehearsals. Off kilter, caught on the fly, secretly observed, these later, signature compositions linked music with movement. But they—and really, the bulk of Degas’s entire oeuvre from the mid-1870s on—were primarily about physical movement, whereas the paintings of domestic performers and their intimate auditors were still deeply concerned with the movements of the mind, with psychology.
Degas was not just amused by the social pageant of these private musical soirées. Nor was he trying to illustrate or embellish his love of music with topical pictures. Rather, he was on the hunt for something, something that had been in his head since painting A Woman Seated Beside a Vase of Flowers. He had an idea, which was that when people were listening to music, their habitual self-consciousness switched off. Their tendency to present themselves, and to respond defensively to their awareness of being watched, was no longer an impediment to truth-telling. They had lost the power to censor themselves. Something more essential, more truthful would emerge, and play across their faces. Degas wanted to capture it.
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WHY DID MANET AND SUZANNE agree to sit for Degas in the first place? Suzanne had had the chance to get to know Degas well by now, and she might have liked the idea that one of the most talented artists of his day, an educated man from a notable family, seemed willing to depict—and therefore, in a roundabout way, to legitimize—her marriage to Manet.
Manet, for his part, might have been encouraged by the several drawings and etchings Degas had already made of him. These light, lovely, admiring images, made between 1864 and 1868, show Manet looking buoyant and enviably debonair, at the racetrack or seated casually on a wooden chair in his studio. Looking at them, you sense a deep affection for their subject on the part of the person who made them. Manet must have been curious to see what Degas could achieve, in a similar vein, in paint. But these early works on paper—comparable, in intent, to the three drawings Lucian Freud made of Francis Bacon before finally painting him—also served a purpose that, in retrospect, seems clear: Degas was gearing up for something bigger. A longer, more calculating look.
The other artists of the Batignolles group had recently taken to portraying one another in casual settings—living rooms, studies, and studios. Degas’s portrait of Manet and Suzanne was part of this improvised, exuberant, lightly competitive tradition. One famous example was painted by Frédéric Bazille in 1870—shortly after Degas’s portrait of Manet and Suzanne, and just months before Bazille was killed leading an assault against Germans in the Franco-Prussian War. It shows Manet standing with the air of an instructor in front of a large canvas on an easel in the studio Bazille shared with Renoir. In the picture, the canvas on the easel is Bazille’s. Other canvases, by Renoir and Bazille, both large and small, hang on the walls—all silent rebukes to the Salon jury, which had rejected them. Edmond Maître plays at a piano in the far corner. Other, unidentified men—perhaps Zacharie Astruc, perhaps Monet and Renoir—stand around talking. The picture hints at the casual camaraderie that existed among these young painters. But it also emphasizes Manet’s authority (he is the only one of the six bearded men who wears a hat), and his willingness to use that authority to influence and even adjust his friends’ pictures. According to Bazille, it was Manet himself who painted in the tall figure shown from the side, holding a palette. That figure is Bazille, and it’s clear from their body postures that he is listening intently to Manet’s advice.
Other artists besides Degas had already painted Manet—most recently Fantin-Latour—and Degas himself had portrayed several other artists, including James Tissot. But tellingly, no one in the group had ever tried to paint Degas.
Sitting for a portrait takes time. It takes patience. Forbearance. A willingness to yield. Perhaps none of the other Batignolles artists could ever quite picture their brilliant young comrade, Degas, submitting to such a process. Or perhaps they simply didn’t trust him not to criticize their efforts, not to remark on the resulting work’s shortcomings in ways less congenial than Manet had apparently mastered.
For, unlike the socially fluent Manet, Degas was fundamentally a loner. He judged others by his own standards of dedication. “There is love and there is work,” he said, “and we only have one heart.”
This was Degas’s public front, anyway. Could his friends have known that this was the same Degas who, in private, felt himself “so badly formed,” as he wrote to his friend Valernes? Who, despite everything, had confessed that he longed for the joys of children? Who worried about loneliness and about the heart being “an instrument that rusts if it is not used”? Who asked: “Without a heart, can one be an artist?”
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BY THE TIME HE CAME to paint Manet and Suzanne, Degas had grown so preoccupied with the subject of marriage that it bordered on an obsession. On Christmas Day 1867—not long after his disappointment with The Bellelli Family—he made the first sketch toward a painting that he would later refer to as “my genre painting.” Dated 1868–69—the same dates as his portrait of Manet and Suzanne—it has been called by others “a masterpiece,” even “the masterpiece,” of Degas’s career.
The painting [see Plate 7] shows a man and a woman in a bedroom lit by lamplight. The woman, dressed only in a white chemise that falls off one shoulder, is seated at the far left of the picture. She faces away from the man, in a posture of shame or distress. Items of her outer clothing—a cloak and a scarf—have been tossed across the foot of the bed on the other side of the room; her corset is strewn on the floor.
Known today as Interior, it was for many years also referred to as The Rape, following the lead of several writers who knew Degas personally and insisted that this was the title he intended. (Other friends, however, claimed that Degas was “incensed” by the widespread adoption of The Rape and denied that a rape was its subject.) The man in the picture, tall, bearded, and fully dressed, stands with his hands in his pockets at the far right. Leaning back against the door, as if to block the woman’s way out, he casts a menacing shadow that rises up behind him. The effect induces instant claustrophobia. Near the center of the painting, on a round table, is an open sewing box with vivid red lining that catches the lamplight. The intensity of the red makes the box by far the most eye-catching object in the painting. Open and exposed, it hints at violated secrets.
Degas put a tremendous amount of thought into the painting. “Genre” pictures traditionally show episodes from everyday life, often with an inferred narrative and an accompanying moral. Mo
ral rhetoric had never been Degas’s style—not even earlier in the decade, when he was absorbed with his ambitious Salon paintings illustrating scenes from history and mythology. But Degas was, as those earlier paintings made clear, preoccupied with relations between the sexes. And in his drive to bring his work into line with the times, he wanted to find a way to grapple with his obsession in a modern way. As he struggled to do so, he thought of the picture almost like a scene from a theater set.
What was the nature of the drama he had in mind? Although the finished painting is not a direct illustration, he seems to have been inspired by specific scenes in two different novels recently published by Émile Zola, Thérèse Raquin and Madeleine Férat.
Zola was Manet’s friend. They had grown especially close over the previous two years, ever since Zola had written rousingly in Manet’s defense when one of his pictures—The Fifer—was rejected by the Salon jury of 1866. Shortly thereafter he became part of Manet’s circle, where Degas also got to know him. Although the two men would later fall out (Zola accused Degas of being “constipated” and of “shutting himself up”; Degas described Zola as “puerile” and, rather more brilliantly, as “a giant studying a telephone book”), for two or three years they got along well.
In 1867, Zola had written a short study of Manet that tried to make the case for his art. His early novel Thérèse Raquin came out in serial form the same year and instantly became a cause célèbre. This, like his link with the scandal-plagued Baudelaire, may not have helped Manet. Critics, who generally disliked the book, noted its vivid visual details. “There are in ‘Thérèse Raquin,’ ” wrote one critic, “paintings that would be worth extracting as samples of the most energetic and the most repulsive that Realism can produce.”
In Interior—but never again (it was to be his last “genre painting”)—Degas appears to have taken up the implied challenge. He wanted to construct a picture that would be as charged, as fraught, as psychologically complex as a scene in a realist novel.
Thérèse Raquin’s climactic twenty-first chapter describes the wedding night of Thérèse and her lover Laurent. Having plotted together to murder her first, sickly husband, they finally succeed in drowning him. They wait more than a year to get married. But during this time, tormented by guilt, they grow apart, and so their wedding night is intensely strained. The relevant chapter begins:
Laurent carefully shut the door behind him, then stood leaning against it for a moment looking into the room, ill at ease and embarrassed…Thérèse was sitting on a low chair to the right of the fireplace, her chin cupped in her hand, staring at the flames. She did not look round when Laurent came in. Her lacy petticoat and bodice showed up dead white in the light of the blazing fire. The bodice was slipping down and part of her shoulder emerged pink…
The fireplace is missing from Degas’s Interior, but almost everything else is in place. Where details do diverge—the painting’s narrow bed, for instance, does not comport with a wedding night—it seems likely that Degas drew on details (the floral wallpaper, “a bed singularly narrow for two people,” “a piece of carpet under the round table,” the “blood-red” tiles) from a similarly dramatic scene in Zola’s Madeleine Férat (which appeared in the fall of 1868).
Pictorial details aside, the psychological point for Degas was surely that, in Thérèse Raquin, Laurent and Thérèse had become alienated from each other because of a shared secret that was too burdensome to manage. They may have successfully attained the status of husband and wife, but they were, like the Bellellis, “doomed to live together yet without intimacy.”
When Degas heard reports that one of the trustees of a major New York museum was thinking of acquiring Interior but was worried about the painting’s subject matter, he protested, in his deadpan manner: “But I would have furnished a marriage license with it.”
It is fascinating to think that Degas was working on Interior at the same time that he was making his portrait of Manet and Suzanne. There are haunting parallels. Both pictures show a man and a woman dispersed at opposite ends of a horizontal composition. In both cases, the woman is seen in profile (displaying one prettily painted ear) and facing away from the man. And both paintings have an enigmatic red shape near the picture’s center. What’s more, Interior, like Monsieur and Madame Édouard Manet, portrays a married couple seemingly alienated from each other.
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MANET’S VARIOUS PORTRAITS OF Suzanne indicate a deep and lasting affection. But he was just nineteen when they first fell in love, and although he was discreet, it’s clear that over the course of their marriage he was less than entirely faithful. He loved beautiful women, and was loved in return. One of those beautiful women, the painter Berthe Morisot, is the third person—the invisible presence—in the room with Manet and Suzanne in Degas’s painting.
Morisot had come into the circle of Manet and Degas toward the end of 1867. She was introduced to Manet by Fantin-Latour in the galleries of the Louvre—the same place Manet and Degas had met. The Louvre was one of the only places artists of both genders could mingle freely, responding to the art of the past on their own terms, without the intercession of formal teachers or the academy. This time, instead of Velázquez—as it had been eight years previously when Manet met Degas—Morisot was copying from Veronese, and Manet from a nearby Titian.
Morisot was sensitive, well read, and already, at the age of twenty-eight, highly accomplished. Her looks were unsettled, alluring. She had dark hair and recessed eyes that gazed out with extravagant intensity. Something unmistakably erotic combusted between her and Manet almost immediately.
She was one of three sisters, all with artistic ambitions. They were in many ways a mirror image of Manet and his brothers, all three the sons of a high-ranking judge, none of them gainfully employed. Berthe and her sister Edma had studied painting under Camille Corot. (Their granduncle was the great eighteenth-century painter Jean-Honoré Fragonard.) Berthe’s painting had earned her favorable reviews and the admiration of fellow painters. In many respects, she was ahead of most of her male peers. But like other talented women of her class and age, she was torn between a pressure, coming from within—to advance herself as an artist—and another imperative, more conventional but no less urgent: to fall in love, to find a husband. Unfortunately, to be a gifted, ambitious, forward-thinking painter was not an advantage for a woman of the 1860s who hoped for marriage. Morisot was acutely conscious of her predicament.
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MANET WOULD CRYSTALLIZE HIS feelings for Morisot in a series of paintings he made of her over the next few years. These paintings, twelve in all, stand as one of the most electrifying records of intimacy in the history of art. Outwardly decorous, they squirm with a concealed erotic turmoil [see Plate 8]. In the gear shifts of Manet’s painterly touch, in the sensual relish of his blacks, and in the private language of the attributes he gives Morisot (a fan, a black ribbon, a bunch of violets, a letter), you feel Manet’s inimitable nonchalance complicated by an unmistakable urgency. Perhaps the most striking thing about them is the directness of Morisot’s intelligent, challenging gaze. Unlike the faces in Manet’s other portraits, her expressions are never neutral. They make it clear that Morisot was someone Manet wanted neither to flatter nor to toy with, but to contend with. It was as if he saw her not as an actor ironically playing a part, as in so many of his other pictures, but as she really was. He saw her whole.
Degas met the Morisots through Manet, and he, too, was intoxicated by them. Indeed, Berthe and her sisters, Edma and Yves, had made an immediate impact on their whole circle, and soon enough both the Manets and Degas were turning up regularly at Madame Morisot’s Tuesday-evening salons, while the Morisots were regular guests at Madame Manet’s on Thursdays.
The Morisot sisters seemed to bring Degas out of himself. He was especially attracted by Berthe and, even as he must have been conscious of the ardor that had ignited between her and Manet, he made efforts to court her.
Did he feel he could comp
ete with Manet? Certainly, as a bachelor, he may have felt that his right to pursue her outweighed his married rival’s. The Morisots, for their part, were intrigued by Degas. And they had the opportunity to get to know him well. It was not unusual for him to spend entire days at their house in the rue Franklin. He disarmed them by talking to them as if they were men. He was mischievous. He was caustic. He told them frankly what he thought. They were amused, flattered, provoked. At the same time, confusingly, Degas acted out charades of chivalrous courtship that were full of provocation even as they bordered on the preposterous. In a letter from early in 1869, Berthe wrote to Edma: “M. Degas came and sat beside me, pretending that he was going to flirt, but his flirtation was limited to a long commentary on Solomon’s proverb: ‘Woman is the desolation of the righteous.’ ”
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SOON AFTER MEETING HER, Manet had asked Berthe to model for The Balcony, his latest, ill-fated attempt to make a favorable impression at the Salon. The request itself carried a frisson of social risk: Berthe and her sisters were daughters of a high-ranking civil servant and a respected salon hostess. Posing for the latest confection by a painter notorious for his bizarre imaginings and slipshod style was not without dangers for a spinster approaching thirty. But as a painter herself, Berthe had enough of a pretext to accept. She was curious to see Manet at work; she knew his achievements, and had long ago recognized his prowess. She had the measure of his strengths and also, perhaps, his weaknesses. (In a letter to Edma, she compared Manet’s paintings to “wild fruits, or even those that are a little unripe”—a superb insight—adding, “They do not displease me in the least.”)
The Art of Rivalry Page 15